The present invention relates to a component assembly apparatus and, more particularly, to a component assembly apparatus including a single picker and a single application of force.
In certain technological fields, a component having optical fibers needs to be attached to a photonic device having a waveguide. A cost effective approach to complete this attachment is to use a high throughput standard pick-'n-place tool, like those used in the semiconductor industry. Thus, during the fiber attachment process, the fibers need to be pressed down into alignment grooves of the photonic device and then the fibers must be slid down the grooves in order for the ends of the fibers to come into contact with the ends of the grooves. This contact is needed in order to have the core of the fibers butt-coupled against the waveguide, which will in turn allow for efficient light coupling as light travels from the fibers to the waveguide and vice versa. Standard pick-'n-place tools do not have the capability for providing the horizontal slide motion during the assembly process.
Standard pick-'n-place tools work in the following manner. A substrate or chip (i.e., the part the component will be placed on) sits on a fixed base and the component is picked up by a motion arm. The component and the substrate/chip are then aligned in the X and Y-axes and the motion arm moves down in the Z-axis to place the component on the substrate/chip. The tip of the motion arm normally has a pressure detector in order to control the force of contact.
Typically, however, the motion arm does not have the capability to make a precise horizontal motion needed to butt-couple the fibers and the waveguide once the components have been placed together. Moreover, even if such precise horizontal motion were possible, the motion arm does not generally have pressure controls in X and Y displacement directions in order to control the force of the butt-couple.